These are some virtual fish made by myself and Darren Fitzpatrick as part of a game at a recent 12 hour GameCraft.
They were meant to be part of a music game, where you attract certain types of fish by playing appropriate musical notes. We didn’t get the game finished, but we did make these beautiful pulsing, flocking, singing fish, which look amazing in VR. If you have a DK2, you can download the binary and try them out for yourself.
Fish models & sounds by Darren Fitzpatrick
Fish AI & animation by Bryan Duggan
Im making procedurally generated fish for an upcoming VR game Deep with Owen Harris. Here is a work in progress video.
All the fish in the video are parameterised, procedurally drawn, and procedurally animated. Each fish is controlled by a number of of simple behaviours such as separation, cohesion, alignment, wander, flee and follow. When the behaviours are combined, a complex system emerges and the fish will flock together. In the system, some of the fish are also programmed to respond to fish of a different type and to the camera. Code on my git:
My Game Engines student assignments for 2014. The assignment was to create an articulated animat or robot simulation that walks, crawls, flies, rolls or drags itself around under its own power. These are all coded in C++ using BGE and the Bullet Physics Engine.
This is a playthrough of a game I made at the recent Dublin GameCraft held in Microsoft in December 2014:
I wanted to make Lunar Lander with Perlin noise, so I shoe-horned the theme into the game a bit by saying you are rescuing boxes of kitties. I’ve since removed all references to cats and basically finished and polished the game so thats it’s a complete experience. Its topped off now with an awesome soundtrack by Kevin Doyle that adds tension to the experience. Everything in the game is 100% procedurally drawn. No sprites.
I find the play experience to be surprisingly varied with several different complex scenarios emerging from the simple mechanics:
Collect the pods
Don’t crash into the ground or the asteroids
Collect the green hexagons so you don’t run out of fuel
Play it through yourself and see what I mean. It only takes around 10 minutes to complete, or watch the video and see.
You can play the game with keyboard using the arrow keys, an XBox controller or for an added challenge by holding your hand over a Leap Motion. Press down to thrust and roll your hand to rotate.
Im looking forward to showing off the 4 player version of YASC at DubLudo this week. Code in the xbox branch of my repo. It looks awesome on the big screen!
As part of an ongoing drive to make more games as part of the courses I teach, I present YASC. YASC is an implementation of the classic SpaceWar game first programmed by Steve Russell at MIT in 1961. In my version, there are two player controlled spaceships. The left (red) player uses the WAD keys to maneuver, S to shoot and E to activate the hyperdrive. The right (green) player uses IJL to move, K to shoot and O to hyperdrive. Each player starts with 5 lives and the winner is the player who is still alive at the end of the game. Gravity affects the ships and the lazers. Fun to play and even more fun to make in Processing!
Hey I am hosting all my courses on github this year. Check them out!
DT228 Object Oriented Programming – A second year course in OOP using Processing & Java. Youtube videos, code examples, labs & solutions.
DT508 Programming – A first year course in programming for game design students using Processing & Java. Code examples, labs & solutions.
DT228/DT211 Game Engines – A fourth year course in how to program a game engine using C++, OpenGL and the Bullet Physics Engine. Youtube videos, code examples, labs & solutions.
DT228/DT211 Game AI (Game Engines 2) – A fourth year course in how to program Game AI for Unity 3D. This is last years course. I’ll be updating in Semester 2
I am phasing the rollout of the new version of Tunepal for IOS by submitting the iPad version Tunepal HD first. Once Im happy it has rolled out successfully, I’ll submit the iPhone version. This version has lots of minor UI changes including an update to the IOS 7 look and feel. It also allows you to import and export tunebooks a lot more easily. The main use for this feature will be synchronising tunebooks across devices. What you can do with this version is email your tunebook to yourself, then open the email on another device and import the tunebook. Tunepal will ignore duplicates. This works across IOS and Android devices.
Hey check out my latest VR demo using the Oculus Rift DK2 with the leap motion for hand tracking in VR:
You can download the binaries and try it out for yourself! At the moment there is a bug that stops the leap service after the program runs, so I’ve included a batch file you can run to restart the service. It will probably work with a DK1 or DK2, though I’ve only tested it with the DK2 Rift. The rift should be set up in extended mode as the secondary display for this project to work. If everything looks “inside out”, change the line:
culling = back
to be:
culling = front
In the file vrgame.properties in the Content folder. You can also run the demo in non-vr mode by editing the settings in this file
The demo is coded in C++ using my custom engine (BGE). Source code can be downloaded from my git repo by running the following command:
Dr Bryan Duggan's Blog 